


ad meliora

by queenbaskerville



Category: Merlin (TV), Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: (sort of), F/F, Lena is Morgana, Lesbian Lena Luthor, Not Canon Compliant, One Shot, Reincarnation, Short One Shot, brief & temporary internalized ableism, gwen is not kara lmfao i wouldn't whitewash our girl like that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:06:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24302605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenbaskerville/pseuds/queenbaskerville
Summary: Lena walks through life feeling like she's always missing something important. Then she meets Gwen.
Relationships: Gwen & Morgana (Merlin), Gwen/Morgana (Merlin), Kara Danvers & Lena Luthor, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor, Lena Luthor & Gwen (Merlin), Lena Luthor/Gwen (Merlin)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 85





	ad meliora

**Author's Note:**

> look i barely remember supergirl i ain't seen it in years; i wrote this in an afternoon because i was gay and nostalgic sorry if it makes no sense <3
> 
> title is latin for "towards better things"

Lena, after being adopted by the Luthors, navigates wealth well. Nannies, manors, tutors, private school, professional life, personal assistants. As an adult, she doesn't need a stylist because she has always had an innate sense of fashion. As a child, even her Halloween costumes are beautiful, the few times they are allowed to participate in frivolous things like Halloween. Lena usually wants to be a princess or a witch. A princess-witch, on one occasion. Sometimes Lex obliges her interests and pretends to be a knight when he plays with her, but he's older and tires of childish games easily. He has his own interests, and she follows him loyally hoping that if she tries hard enough her new family will love her the way she needs them to. Lena adores Lex. It isn't enough.

Once, while they're still young, she asks to paint Lex's nails. He refuses, gets angry. She pities him. Neither of them will step even a toe outside their assigned boxes, it seems, even when, for a little while, they are close, even when they are friends. Their paths diverge as they grow older. They both have roles to play.

"When I grow up," young Lex tells her, "I'm gonna have all the money in the world, and I'm gonna build a house, and I'm gonna keep us safe forever."

Lena has to build her own walls around herself instead. And she takes L-Corp, and she sits in a fifty-some story building, in her high office alone, like a princess in a tower, and she controls as much as she can, waiting for her growing wealth and power to feel like _enough_.

Lena spends a lot of time looking over her shoulder. Partly because she's a bit paranoid, but mostly because she keeps thinking someone is meant to be there by her side. She's reminded of a joke and so she turns, but there's no one. Who is she looking for? There's never been anyone. Lena isolates herself for a reason. It's easier that way.

Lex Luthor's paranoia extends beyond even Lena's. His rivalry with Superman has him jumping at shadows, snapping at everyone, doing terrible, awful, evil things and bringing about his own downfall.

"What happened to you, Lex?" she asks once.

"I grew up," he says.

It's a disgusting thing for him to say. It is not as if he has discovered something about himself that the rest of the world has made him loathe. It is not as if he has been thrust into a new life alone and unprotected and forced to cope with the veil pulled back from his eyes. No, he's as privileged and powerful as he ever was. He's just become paranoid and xenophobic, and he doesn't care who he hurts to get what he wants.

* * *

Lena meets Kara Danvers. She's told herself before not to fall for straight women. Not for anyone, really—that would involve a level of emotional vulnerability she can never put herself at risk for—but especially not straight women. Lena falls for Kara anyway, head over heels, swept up in her kindness and her inexplicable bravery. Lena takes a look at the walls she has tentatively built around herself and thinks about installing a door. For the first time in a long time, she lets herself trust someone, befriend someone, love someone.

It doesn't last.

Oh, she reaches out to Kara-Supergirl again, befriends her again, tries to repair a trembling relationship, but the secrets—she can't take the secrets and the lying. She won't do it anymore. She has made so many mistakes, trusted the wrong people. How does she always end up here, hurt and alone?

 _I'm suffocating,_ she thinks. _God, I'm suffocating._

Lena imagines that she's full of boxes. Every feeling she's ever had gets packed into boxes upon boxes, like nesting dolls, and then buried so deep it's like she has never had feelings in the first place.

Her infatuation with Kara Danvers is put in one such box. She thinks she might be able to be friends with her again—but she can't be in love with someone who lies to her. She can't do it.

* * *

Parents who do cruel things, friends who lie to her, a brother she can't trust. Lena settles into this. It is all familiar. Of course she takes it into her skin, wraps herself in it and in sorrow. Somehow she knows that this is the way things are supposed to be.

Even the fact that Lex is her paternal half-brother, rather than her adoptive brother, while shocking, still feels right. Like a sick joke, but one that the universe has played on her before.

* * *

"I was brought to this terrible family," Lena says once, almost like a confession, "and I have spent my life fighting their legacy, and their crimes, and their evil deeds, but I've always known that, deep down inside, I belonged with them."

There are a lot of things Lena knows deep down. This is one thing. Here's another: she is rotten. It's related, but not the same. Even before she was adopted, she knew there was something wrong with her. There was always this weight behind her eyes, a headache that wouldn't go away. Nightmares that followed her beyond childhood and later wouldn't abate without sleeping pills. Aching, chronic pain through her nerves, her joints, and she won't be ableist against herself anymore, but as a little girl she feels this horrible, piercing pain and thinks that it's her fault, that she's done something wrong. There's a new, worse pain that blossoms once she hits puberty, and when she's twenty-two her general chronic pain is joined by a diagnosis of endometriosis, but even knowing what it is, she still dreams of getting stabbed. _I did something wrong_ , she thinks. She tries not to turn it outward—tries not to let it become, _Somebody wronged me_ —because she won't let herself become like Lex, needlessly and senselessly cruel. There will be no innocents in her crossfire.

* * *

Nia Nal's ears stick out in an adorable way. Lena puts the thought in another box and buries it. Nia's a bit young for Lena—and Lena can't shake the irrational feeling that those big ears, while cute, are bad news.

* * *

Another supervillain incident destroys a sculpture garden in National City. One of the nearby universities puts their student art there normally, but it's June; there's not much they can send until their next semester. Lena purchases a large, appropriately expensive sculpture, twisted and metallic and looming, and donates it to the garden. The sculptor's name is Guinevere Jones.

Lena meets her at an art gallery fundraiser a few weeks later. They get to talking about the sculpture that Lena purchased— _Dragon's Breath,_ Guinevere calls it, even though Lena hadn't been able to make heads or tails of the twisted thing—and Guinevere shakes her hand and offers a polite, "It's a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Luthor."

"Just Lena is fine," Lena says. 

"Well, my friends call me Gwen," she replies, and she beams like a radiant summer afternoon.

 _Oh,_ Lena thinks. _It's you. I was looking for you._

* * *

"My father is a blacksmith," Gwen says.

"Does he make—swords and things?" Lena says.

"Horse shoes, and other projects," Gwen says, but then she smiles. "Maybe a few swords. Have you ever seen that show _Forged in Fire_?"

"I haven't," Lena says. "Is he on?"

"No, he doesn't like that sort of attention," Gwen says. "But he'd win."

"Is blacksmithing where you started with metalwork?" Lena says.

Gwen nods.

"I'm pretty good at it," she admits.

"Don't sell yourself short," Lena says.

"I could make you a sword," Gwen says.

"Would you?"

"Bring me another glass of champagne," Gwen says, "and I'll think about it."

* * *

Gwen makes her the sword.

Lena has it mounted on a wall in her bedroom.

* * *

"So," Kara says, "who is she?"

"Who?" Lena says.

"Your new friend," Kara says. "I saw her leaving when I swung by your office yesterday for that quote for my article."

"Oh, that was Gwen," Lena says. "It was my lunch break."

"Oh?" Kara says.

"We met at an art gallery something or other last year and hit it off."

Kara raises her eyebrows.

"Not like that," Lena says.

She's thought about it. Of course she has, when Gwen is so beautiful, so kind, so funny, so electric. Gwen is who she calls at night when she can't sleep, and when she does sleep but wakes from a nightmare. Gwen's the one who suggested keeping a dream journal, who listens when she's afraid rather than shutting her down or placating her just to get her to shut up. And Lena is who Gwen calls when Gwen is having brotherly troubles of her own—her dear Eli, who has had several rows with their father and hasn't returned her calls in half a year. Gwen puts on DVR recordings of _Forged in Fire_ when she misses him—Lena thinks of chess when she misses Lex, the old Lex, and she can't stand to look at a chess board. Gwen notices without saying and puts hers away after the first time that Lena visits.

"Have you ever met someone," Lena says, "and felt like you've known them your whole life?"

Lena huffs an embarrassed laugh and looks down at the table. 

"Or maybe I just wished it," Lena says.

"Wished what?" Kara says.

"That she was there the whole time," Lena says.

Kara tilts her head, but Lena doesn't know how to explain the certainty, the _rightness_ , when Gwen had walked into her life. 

"Never mind," Lena says.

They lapse into a comfortable silence.

"So," Kara says, in a voice that promises teasing, "when do I get to meet her?"

"We're not _together_ ," Lena says, embarrassed again, and Kara chuckles.

* * *

Lena sits up gasping from a nightmare so horrible that she forgets to text Gwen to ask if she's awake; she just calls, with a white-knuckled grip on her cell phone.

"Lena?" Gwen says, answering on the second ring. "Everything okay?"

"It was horrible," Lena says. She's still trembling, and she tries not to stutter. "Everything was red—it was a dream, it was just a dream, but Gwen, my helicopter was shot out of the sky."

"It's alright," Gwen says. "Tell me."

"I was falling," Lena whispers. "I fell for so long. It was so dark. There was—a pit. Or a laboratory? My—my mother told me it was water but it wasn't, it was poison, she made me drink poison, and then she changed faces, the floor was made of stone, she held me as I choked on _poison_ —"

"Deep breath," Gwen says. 

Lena takes a deep breath. She lets one hand reach out for her bedside table, for the dream journal she keeps in a drawer there.

"I'm sorry I woke you," she says. "I'm sorry. I'll let you go; I should write this down."

"No, stay," Gwen says. "It's alright, stay on. Tell me everything."

"I said these horrible things," Lena says. "I was attacking someone. Someone—Supergirl. I said terrible things."

_You don't know the first thing about pain, but I do._

"And Supergirl just _let_ me."

_I won't fight you, Lena._

"I don't want to hurt anyone," Lena says, and she's still shaking. "What if turn into him?"

She doesn't have to say who she's talking about.

"At my core," Lena whispers, "what if I'm a monster?"

It might be a silly question if they led normal lives. But this is National City. They both know better.

"No one is born monstrous," Gwen says. "You're not a monster. There's nothing in you that's _bad_. Okay? You do things, or you don't do them. You always have a choice. Sometimes it's easier to think that you don't."

"Thank you," Lena says. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For reminding me," Lena says.

"Always," Gwen says.

Lena wipes tears from her eyes and huffs.

"I hope your night is going better than mine," she says.

Gwen laughs.

"It's better now that you've called," she says.

"I'm sure," Lena says.

 _I wish you were here,_ Lena thinks. She wraps Gwen's voice around herself like a blanket and braves the night.

* * *

Lena adores Kara. She does. And she wouldn't give up their friendship for anything. But it's different, being friends with someone who's not tangled up in the _Super-Luthor_ thing. There's a little bit of freedom in it. A little more room to breathe.

* * *

"I can't—I can't do _lying_ ," Lena says.

"What?" Gwen says. She puts down her chopsticks, take out chow mein momentarily forgotten.

"After everything—I just hate it, the secrecy and the lying and the—" Lena almost says betrayal, but she realizes that she's being a bit dramatic out of nowhere.

She forces herself to look up, to make eye contact, because she needs to see the look on Gwen's face when she says this, needs to know, this time, that everything is real.

"If there's something you need to tell me," Lena says, "just _say_ you can't tell me, and I'll leave it alone. Just don't _lie_. Please."

"Alright," Gwen says, and her eyes are full of concern, and she takes Lena's hand. "I promise."

Lena squeezes her hand. 

"I'm sorry," she says.

"Don't be," Gwen says. "Will you promise me, too?"

"Promise you what?" Lena says.

"That you'll be honest with me," Gwen says. "If you need space, or if you're in danger, or if there's something you feel like you can't say. Trust and loyalty—they're two-way streets. It's not giving and giving and empty hands in return."

"I promise," Lena says. "I swear it."

"Good," Gwen says, and she raises Lena's hand and kisses her knuckles, like an oath, like a vow.

* * *

Lena wakes in the night to her phone ringing.

"Lena Luthor," she says, blinking herself awake.

"Lena," Gwen says, and her tone of voice makes Lena sit straight up in bed.

Every horrible possibility flashes through her mind—something has happened, Gwen is hurt, Gwen is sick, Gwen has been _kidnapped_ — 

"I just wish I could forget," Gwen says, and she bursts into tears.

Lena puts one hand over her chest and wills her heart to stop trying to punch its way out of her chest.

"Forget what, dear?" she says. "Take a deep breath, it's alright."

"I had a dream that my father was sick," Gwen says. She tries to laugh, but she's still crying, so the sound comes out funny. "My turn with the dreams, right?"

"Tell me," Lena says.

"I dreamed he was sick and that no one would let me in their home," Gwen says. "Everyone kept pushing me away, shutting me out. Even my own home was barred to me. Then there was a forest, and I was alone—"

She pauses. When she speaks again, she sounds tired.

"I was just so lonely," Gwen says, "for a long time. I just felt so alone. Sometimes it feels like there's this weight on my chest and I can't breathe."

"I'm right here," Lena says. "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."

* * *

When Kara asks about Gwen, Lena tells Kara the things people expect when trying to get to know someone. Gwen's profession, Gwen's interests, where she's from, what they do when they spend time together.

Lena doesn't tell Kara about the flowers—the bouquet or two Gwen sends to her office, the seeds Lena brings once for Gwen's little windowsill garden, the sunflowers when Gwen and Lena take a trip together, just the two of them, to the Van Gogh museum in the Netherlands, because Gwen has always wanted to go.

Lena doesn't tell her about Gwen's radiant smile, or her brown eyes that Lena gets lost in, or her _voice_ , God, the way she talks has a way of making Lena unravel, like she wants to kneel at Gwen's feet and pray, or ask for forgiveness. What for, she can't imagine. She hasn't done anything to wrong Gwen. She prays she never will. How could she ever do anything bad to a woman like that. Sometimes Lena is surprised that someone like Gwen gives someone like Lena the time of day.

The surprise doesn't last, though. It can't compete with the ingrained sense of safety and rightness that Lena feels at Gwen's side. _I'm meant to be here._

* * *

There's an afternoon together in some winter or another when they're outside, sunlight making the snow look like glitter, and Gwen leans in and kisses her.

"Should I apologize?" Gwen says.

"No," Lena says.

Lena kisses her back.


End file.
